Do the kings and prince’s of Saudi Arabia spend time with the aborigines of Australia? Do the captains of industry in the western world hang with the indigenous of the American continents? Do the Russian oligarchs hang with the Aleuts and Inuits of the Arctic regions? And so on. Probably not.
Wealth and power can put heroin addiction to shame.
Wealth and power can correct social and planetary imbalances, or tip the balance to unsustainable levels.
Unlike our more adorable and endangered sea otter, vultures have a public relations issue. Admiring vultures is an acquired appreciation. Their bald heads with massive beaks that can tear through a thick hide, and their food source — dead animals — is an unlikely point of polite conversation. It’s a image issue.
Do not use
sacred words
with thoughts
of destruction;
with thoughts
of consumption;
with thoughts
of false wealth.
Editor’s Note: After 41 days of occupation, the standoff no longer stands. For an update by Jake Klonoski, please scroll to the end of this post. Saturday, I sliced into a medium rare steak hot off the grill. Smothered in garlic, salt and pepper, it was delicious. The evening’s news rambled in the background. When the news anchor turned to an Oregon report about a group of armed men still holding the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge hostage, my blood pressure jumped a […]
…a few days before this Christmas when I spent a night in my daughter and her husband’s Taos Ski Valley condo. It’s near the first chairlift. Looking out the patio door I recalled taking both my daughters, who were about 11 and 13 at the time, for a day skiing there.
Acres of brown and late summer-weary grasses that were born green in the spring, bend to a cool breeze spawned from the sea below and the sky above. It’s like sitting in the center of a terrarium of earth, sea, and sky.
“This is like living in a third-world country with high-end tax bills!” I screamed while scrubbing the bathroom with the captured water, which was not going to leave enough water to flush the toilet later on. I took a break. When I looked at my garden, the artichoke plants drooped like my sullen mood. They needed water. Thank goodness we captured some rainwater from the roof into a 300-gallon tank that sits in the driveway. It’s the new drought fashion accessory.
This story can also be read in The Cambrian Embedded just over my right eye is a one-inch scar. I was a tad […]
…the moistened soil–autumn-sun warmed–seduced dormant seeds awake. A resurrection of green slipped through the layer of fallen leaves and dried grasses. By morning a thunderous roar filled the canyon. The Kaweah River no longer struggled to trickle through plump gray boulders.
